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In furthering my research, I hit specificity jackpot.
I found some researchers (Jeffrey T.
Hancock, Michael T. Woodworth and Stephen Porter) asking and answering the same linguistic question. What a great tool for making seating charts, navigating blind dates,
and –most importantly – crafting the dialogue of a villain! Their analysis was
focused on psychopaths and non-psychopaths talking about homicide, but I think
that there are trends that may work really well for writing psychopathic
characters even when not talking about homicide. Their findings were as follows:
1.
“Psychopaths
(relative to their counterparts) included more rational cause and-effect
descriptors (e.g., ‘because’, ‘since’).” Such an easy add to writing, and
psychologically fascinating because it shifts the blame to the universe or the victim,
and away from the villain. In writing a psychopath villain, keeping the mindset
of universe-blame might be as valuable as the use of peppering the aftermath of
one of his crimes with “because” and since.”
2.
“[Psychopaths] focused
on material needs (food, drink, money), and contained fewer references to
social needs (family, religion/spirituality).” Ooooh…how many
chilly scenes can we reference of villains eating a victim’s sandwich or complaining
about the sound of the air conditioning in the height of a killing? Tarrantino,
the Cohen brothers, and the like know the balance of the horrific and mundane
trick all too well. Who knew they were mirroring the linguistic patterns of
psychopaths so perfectly?
3.
“Psychopaths’
speech contained a higher frequency of disfluencies (‘uh’, ‘um’) indicating that
describing such a powerful, ‘emotional’ event to another person was relatively difficult
for them.”
Yikes! If saying “um” is a sign of psychopathy, I’m in trouble, but it seems
that these disfluencies are at a time when others are talking about emotions. Not only can the “uh’s” help
you craft a psychopath’s language, but may also help you linguistically show the
difficulty one of your characters may have with a topic other than emotions or
murder.
4.
“Psychopaths
used more past tense and less present tense verbs in their narrative,
indicating a greater psychological detachment from the incident, and their
language was less emotionally intense and pleasant.” Interesting!
Linguistically pushing events away from them/their crime by using time. Very
sneaky. And an easy tool for mimicking a psychopath’s dialogue/line of
thinking.
And
for a final link on how to craft the psychopath’s language, the FBI used the
findings listed above as part of a training on “The Language of Psychopaths” –
an excellent article by the researchers listed above as well as a slew of other
big-name experts in the field.
Fascinating post!
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